This is a grumpy old man comedy. It starts with widower Ove (Lassgard) doing his morning round of the housing association block looking for infringements of the rules and arguing with a shop assistant about the price of the flowers he's buying to put on his wife's grave. So right away we have the measure of this man called Ove – he's a Swedish Victor Meldrew. Except of course he can't be, because he isn't in a sitcom. On TV, Ove could enforce all the petty regulations and get into comic scrapes week after week, year after year. In the movies an old man who is grumpy in the first frame cannot be allowed to remain so by the last one – redemptions and back stories are required.

Of course, you don't want him to be redeemed, or to find out how he got to be that way. The film's main comic thrust is Ove's repeated failed suicide attempts – just as he's about to end it all and be reunited with his beloved Sonja (Engvoll) some little aggravation pops up to distract him. In the audience we are quite happy for him to stay in the darkness, where it is funnier, but the film needs to pull him into the light. The main puller is a new neighbour, an Iranian born mother (Pars.) There are also lots of scenes showing the young Ove (Berg) with his impossibly loving Sonja.

The film is undeniably formulaic and sentimental but though you can often feel the pull of the lead, yanking us towards the light, it doesn't feel like you are being led too forcefully. It's manipulative hooey really, but it is funny and occasionally moving in ways that are quite subtle. Though the two performers don't look that similar, there's a revealing moment late on when I found myself looking at the young Ove, and suddenly seeing the connection with the older incarnation, how one could become the other.

Everyone is an “Idiot” to Ove, but none more than the “men in white shirts,” the petty bureaucrats who he has railed against all his life. The film shares his view of them which is somewhat hypocritical seeing as Ove is his own petty tyrant, always enforcing his little rules. Though he is socially liberal, isn't racist or homophobic, he is very conservative figure. He is a handy man, a do it yourselfer who believes people should stand up for themselves and not rely on others.